Imputation of Missing Links and Attributes in Longitudinal Social Surveys

We propose a unified approach for imputation of the links and attributes in longitudinal social surveys which accounts for changing network topology and interdependence between the actor´s links and attributes. The previous studies on the treatment of non-respondents in longitudinal social networks were mostly concerned with imputation of the missing links only or imputation effects on the networks statistics. For this study we conduct a set of experiments on synthetic and real life datasets with 20%-60% of nodes missing under four mechanisms. The obtained results were better than when using alternative methods which suggest that our method can be used as a viable imputation tool.